The November talk was a great event with Dr Lewys Brace from Exeter University discussing “Biases when exploring online extremist sub-cultures and the “inceolosphere”: examples from the ConCel project”. Incels, short for “involuntary celibate”, is an online sub-culture where individuals define themselves by their inability to form sexual relationships with women. Recent years have seen an increase in the amount of work using large-scale, data-driven, analysis methods to understand such ecosystems, and this work typically utilises text data acquired from online spaces, which is then analysed using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. However, there are several points along the road from data collection, through to interpretation of results where biases can emerge when using such methods on these online sub-cultures.
Lewys talked to us about how bias can appear by:
- Not selecting the “right” online spaces for gathering data
- The data collected may not be representative of the extremist ecosystem
- The initial “seed” list may be biased – (manual checking attempts to reduce this)
- Data cleaning – as these sites have a specific sub cultural language in use – interrogation of the data in depth helps with this
- Edgy humour can be a euphemism for racist, misogynistic and homophobic views, is it irony or genuine?
- Deciding on the measure to use can be problematic – using multiple measures
helps with a “sanity check” and can offer additional insights.
The team used the Fisher Jenks algorithm which uses an iterative approach to find the best groupings of numbers based on how close they are together; (i.e. based on variance from the group’s mean) while also trying to ensure the different groupings are as distinct as possible (by maximizing the group’s variance between groups). Analyses were also carried out at the micro-level to adopt a context-based approach i.e. integration of ideology with personal life experiences and the macro-level which can cause issues in this case with the use of hateful language. This was mitigated by using violent language and out group terms in the analysis.
A very engaging question and answer session followed covering many aspects of Lewys work such as: group isolation, whether Incels use the dark web (they tend not to), whether the groups can be infiltrated (no, people doing this are spotted, ridiculed and driven out), cross culture (groups are emerging in Japan and Russia), Incel demographics (young, white males in general) and how to track individuals over time. Further work in this area is ongoing using topic modelling and the idea of potential hybrid ideologies.
Link to accompanying report
